


Supervenient

by gabolange



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: F/M, Philosophy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-25
Updated: 2010-04-25
Packaged: 2017-10-09 03:56:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/82798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabolange/pseuds/gabolange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How much is she Jolinar, now?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Supervenient

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to pellucid for the beta. And my university philosophy of the mind professor for the inspiration.

The first thing Sam remembers upon waking is the feel of Cassie's hand in her hair, and the second is the terror of feeling her hands move against her volition, of her mouth issuing a voice that is not her own. She never tells anyone, even later when the memories have faded like her infinite scars, that it was weeks before she could look at the little girl and not want to scream.

*

She learns that Martouf was Jolinar's lover, or maybe Rosha's, or maybe the three of them and Lantash loved each other, and it confuses her. Martouf looks at her with tenderness she doesn't deserve, because she never wanted to know Jolinar, never wanted the responsibility—the difficulty—of remembering lifetimes she didn't experience. But he holds her hand, softly, and the part of her that's been burned so many times thinks it's only because she is all that remains of something he treasured. It's a little like being second-best, and she doesn't want to be second to anything, least of all a dead, body-hopping snake.

She wants to ask him how it works, the body-switching. How is it that the host can retain the memory of the symbiote and the symbiote those of the host? How much is she Jolinar, now?

When they leave the Tok'ra, after her father is safely ensconced with thousands of years of someone else in his head, she reads as much as she can on multiple personality disorder—dissociative identity disorder, she corrects herself—but she doesn't want to think of herself as mentally unstable. Hours spent perusing a stolen copy of Janet's _DSM-IV_ reveal no other fitting analogy, and she isn't sure what to make of "two or more distinct personality states" and "take control of the person's identity on a regular basis." There are references to hosts.

She is the host, now, the personality that controls motion and function. The clinically insane of Earth and the Tok'ra, the closest allies of the Tau'ri. One and the same, and Sam slams the book against the desk in her lab.

There is nothing there to explain the _oldest and wisest of the Tok'ra_ or the heat that erupts in her belly every time Martouf walks into a room. These things don't belong to her, not really, because she's never held him, never felt his hands against her skin and never will, but the memory is present and as inextricably hers as the desperate tears she sheds when she learns her father will live.

There is no definition for this.

*

After Ne'tu, Sam stays away from the base for a week as images collide against her skull.

_Rosha and Jolinar argue about Bynarr. Jolinar is firm that getting to the man—fucking him, Rosha corrects her—is the only way off this moon. And Jolinar may be right, usually is, certainly is, but Rosha struggles to explain that she cannot bear the thought of fingers and hips and teeth that belong to anyone other than Martouf. Does not want to share her body—and here Jolinar interrupts her with a sarcastic laugh and Rosha acknowledges but does not appreciate the irony._

"We will not tell him," Jolinar explains. "We cannot. It would hurt him too much."

And it would. Lantash might understand, as Jolinar does, but Martouf would never see the need. Another way, he would argue, desperately, fervently, painfully. There could have been something else, he might say, the gentle man they both loved.

But Jolinar is resourceful and their body is a resource to be exploited. She has always prided herself on being kind to the flesh she inhabits, made a point of it when introducing herself to Rosha so long ago. "I will not hurt you," she had promised in the soft voice of an old woman, and had meant it not about the joining process but about their life together. Rosha had later learned that Jolinar could be deceitful, could injure and maim in the name of petty slights, admired and resented her for it; still, this vow was never among the many lies Jolinar would tell.

Rosha almost accuses Jolinar of backing out of their deal, but Jolinar knows her thoughts before she can give them structure.

"I will not do that which is not necessary," Jolinar says.

Sam has had her share of failed relationships. No more than most, at least as far as she can tell. Of the fourteen women stationed at the SGC, only two are married. A lieutenant assigned to SG-8 is rumored to have a partner, but Sam isn't sure and doesn't want to know. Of the remainder, four are divorced and seven have never made it to the altar; each has her own horror story, though Sam hopes that "appointed himself the god of an alien planet" will remain the most extreme example.

Every man she has ever been with has left something behind. A ratty sweatshirt she pulls out to dust her windowsills, a two-inch scar from a lamp thrown in anger, a touch that will always burn with goodbye, an old motorcycle.

Jolinar has abandoned a lifetime in her mind, and Sam thinks she prefers the scar—.

_Rosha's eyes close, and she does not know if it is she or Jolinar guiding the action. Their Goa'uld captors know they are Tok'ra, would not have imprisoned them here for anything less egregious, but Jolinar has stayed in control for the duration of their stay. Better for the other prisoners to think they are a minor Goa'uld, disgraced for an abuse of power, because the other prisoners hate the Tok'ra, too, and Rosha understands._

Sometimes, though, she wishes for complete command of her body, the opportunity to simply feel without interference or comment. But this mere flesh would have withered and died, if not from disease or injury then simply from old age, and she cannot doubt that the exchange—my life for yours—was worthwhile. Still, she does not remember the pain of recuperation from injury, though she knows she experienced it as a small child, long before she had heard the words "Tok'ra" or "System Lords" or "condemned to death."

It was that last, echoing in her ears as her family, friends, fell to Jaffa weapons far more advanced than their own, that encouraged her to seek out the Tok'ra, to pledge her life to decimating the creatures that were not gods but murderers. But as she gave her body over to Jolinar for the first time, she marveled at the anathema: to fight them, she would have to become them. Like them. In that moment, it was a minute difference.

Jolinar has not yet broken her promise.

It will be necessary to flirt, to bat her eyes at this man, their captor. He will not be drawn in immediately, no, it will take time and effort and sex of the basest kind. They will offer their body in exchange for their freedom, and it is the memory of—the hope for—a bright morning or a clean tunnel away from the death and destruction that surrounds them that will force them to succeed.

Sam is not a pilot by Air Force standards, and her private license has long since expired. But she has completed flight training, has flown second seat and navigated countless—exactly 154 hours of countless—missions in defense of her country and her planet.

She first learned to fly because of the opportunities it would provide. Flight qualification was the first step toward NASA, then a strong point on a resume that guaranteed her the posting of her choice for the rest of her career. Sam didn't stop to appreciate the beauty of simply flying until she sat behind Colonel O'Neill in a stolen Goa'uld fighter and could do nothing but watch as the stars floated by.

It is a little like that second seat, this place she has been forced to reside in her own mind. An active observer, prohibited from participating in any real sense; the controls are located somewhere she cannot reach.

She closes her eyes and wishes for freefall—.

_When she is on her knees at Bynarr's feet, Jolinar molding his flesh with her hands, encouraging him towards release and pliancy, Rosha remembers Lantash. The feeling of Martouf's mouth on her skin, but it was Lantash's voice, deep and resonant, that would echo in her ears. "I love you," he would say as he urged her toward oblivion, and he meant her, both of them. _

She would laugh, eventually, that for all her discomfort at taking a symbiote, she would fall in love with one. And hard she fell, impossible to pinpoint when—perhaps that first moment when his eyes flashed with anger at the council's unwillingness to act more strongly against Ra, more likely that second time he looked across that table toward her with his lips quirking upwards with a smile that spoke of a shared secret, an invitation. Certainly, she loved him long before those nights when, breathless, she slipped back into her mind and felt Jolinar curve their body toward him.

Lantash slipped away, then, too, for Rosha had learned over the short course of their—could it be called a courtship, between battles and covert missions that accomplished too little?—joining wasn't the right word, either—over the course of their relationship, that Jolinar sought the soft whisper of Martouf's breath in her hair, his gentle tones as she fell asleep. Rosha was lulled to sleep each night not by the touch Jolinar craved like a child, but by the thought that Jolinar's hubris slipped away with the light.

Daniel lends her a dusty book on the philosophy of consciousness, and there is only one theory Sam thinks might apply. It states that it is impossible to alter the physical without concomitant adjustment to the mental. She breaks it down the way she would for the colonel on one of his impossible days: if there has been a physical change, there must also have been a mental change—and neither has to be seen to be present.

This Sam understands because she works with particles that most physicists can barely imagine; the wormholes through which she travels are made up of countless unseen objects that nonetheless constitute a whole. A tiny change to the physics of those items—one atom, misadjusted—one technical error by a gate technician—and the whole of the wormhole collapses as if it never were.

She can transpose this idea well enough. Jolinar is the residual naquadah in her bloodstream, is now no less an integral part of her than the electrons and protons that coalesce into her day job. A remnant shifts, and so must the mind.

When sensation overwhelms her, when there is nothing but taste, touch, Jolinar in her mind, she reassures herself that she has recourse to physics—.

_Rosha is awake now, huddled away from physical feeling, safe in her head, letting Jolinar—Jolinar who never hesitated to let Rosha feel as much as she wanted with Lantash, Jolinar who protested so often that romance was for the young, even though Rosha knew her, knew that if Martouf managed to steal one of the purple flowers from the hydroponics tunnels, it was Jolinar who coaxed their lips into that brilliant smile that Lantash and Martouf both loved—letting Jolinar seduce Bynarr. _

Perhaps she should be thankful that Jolinar does not have the same compunctions about the body, about sensation, that come with having been born human. Jolinar has had many hosts before, will take other hosts later, when Rosha can no longer serve her purpose, and it might make Rosha sick, the thought that she is a tool for the Tok'ra, but as she curls away from the sensations of Bynarr so close, tasting salt in her mouth, Rosha is glad for the symbiote that keeps her from vomiting.

In some ways, it is worse than the torture. That had been blinding pain, searing light, Jolinar screaming in her mind to make it stop now make it stop and Rosha could do nothing from her safe hiding place in her own brain. She could whisper, "Tell them nothing," but it wouldn't help, was nothing Jolinar didn't already know, fuck it Rosha just shut up for a minute and let me think, and then the pain would begin again.

There is no other choice, can be no other choice but dirty fingers digging painfully into skin left unwashed, grasping as for a prize. Once, twice, ten times they return to him, pliant and giving. Jolinar runs her hand over their body, coaxing him into lust and need, moving in a way Martouf and Lantash have never seen; seduction, and Rosha wonders which one of Jolinar's hosts taught her these things, which aspect of genetic memory it is that allows Jolinar to trail the back of her hand over Bynarr's sweaty form and whisper his name.

As a teenager, smarter than her peers and uninterested in their antics, Sam still worked to determine what inspired them. Let boys touch her, confused by the delight and power she saw in their smooth faces. Let girls do her hair and talk about the boys, amused by their certainty that these trivialities were important.

Watched as her brother broke the rules, tried it herself. A missed curfew, an older boyfriend, alcohol and sex in the car after senior prom. She was grounded and ignored it; her brother was thrown out of the house. She stopped speaking to him because she couldn't understand how he could be so stupid; he stopped speaking to her because he had no idea why she wasn't punished in the same way.

Watched as her father drifted further away, always angry and certain of himself and his role in their lives. Never knew, not until many years later and _the oldest and wisest of the Tok'ra_, just how wrong she had been.

An opportunity to understand—.

_He loves her, Bynarr says, months of nights later. She smiles, perhaps too sweetly, and kisses his shoulder, nipping at the fat, and Rosha hears her voice—their voice—return the affection, and her stomach roils. Jolinar sends her an admonition not to distract, a reminder. _

She has spent days—a hundred, or two, and it is too many, and she can no longer tell one from the other except by those few where she is not subjected to the torturer's stick or Bynarr's touch, and on those nights she cannot help but picture—what?

A man who should have given up, a cause losing now for thousands of years, the promise of something that she only appreciated secondhand—and Jolinar does not spare her a thought, now when Rosha might welcome it. She is too intent on Bynarr, on the sounds he makes as he uses their body for his pleasure.

She remembers Lantash's voice, Martouf's touch, and it is not enough. Perhaps it will never be enough. Bynarr curls his hands in their hair, longer now than it ever was, and holds her close, and those are not Martouf's hands lulling them to sleep, and she does not know, now, if it is she or Jolinar who wishes in the dark.

Rosha stops counting the days, buries herself deeply in the darkest corners of her mind, and they escape.

Easy, she thinks, waking and confident. Jolinar responds a little snidely, "It was in no way easy." There is another pause, but the reprimand in Jolinar's voice is clear. "I did what you could not."

I did only that which was necessary.

Rosha apologizes quietly, then out loud to an empty room as they fly away in the stolen tel'tac.

Jolinar says nothing.

Sam wakes on the seventh day with a new perspective and an awful headache. Her house is empty, but she is not alone.

*

Martouf dies in Sam's arms, but it is Jolinar who grieves. Sam wants to apologize, knows enough to know better. What could she say to the ghost in her head?

I wish I loved him. I wish I hadn't had to kill him. I wish the Tok'ra would leave and never come back. I hate you for today. I hate you for everything you couldn't teach me. I'm sorry.

There is no response to her roiling thoughts.

For the first time since Jolinar, Sam curses the silence.


End file.
